Kress 84-121

I would like to comment on the discussion of writing beginning on page 89. This passage made me think about my high school English classes and how the only correct interpretation of a poem or other piece of writing was what the teacher said. I used to write papers that were considered "way off base" from what the poem was "really" saying. This was a very discouraging experience and once I got to college, I realized that it did not have to be that way. I was always challenging my English teachers because I enjoyed reading, writing, and using my imagination to figure out what the author was trying to say, which did not bode well for my grade. In college, I found, you can say anything as long as something in the poem or piece of writing can back you up. In high school, my classmates always had differing points of view about whatever we were reading and some of them were even more "off base" then I was, which is a testament to the fact that they were teaching the way they had been taught, which was to assume that their students "shared a homogeneous social background", while in college, most professors realize that this is not the case.
I am not sure if any of what I just wrote makes sense and if it is even pertinent, but it is what I thought about when I read that part of the book.